Chapter Nineteen. In the Camp of the Gypsies

In the Camp of the Gypsies

He paused in back of the camper with the unicorn and the maiden on the side, a narrow shadow among other shadows, but more constant than those thrown by the shifting flames. He stood there listening to their quiet conversation, the occasional burst of laughter, the pop of an exploding knot in the fire.

I can't go out there, his mind insisted with utter certainty. There was fear in this certainty, but also intertwined in it were inarticulate feelings of shame and propriety - he no more wanted to break into the concentric circles of their campfire and their talk and their privacy than he had wanted to have his pants fall down in Hilmer Boynton's courtroom. He, after all, was the offender. He was...

Then Linda's face rose up in his mind; he heard her asking him to come home, and beginning to cry as she did.

He was the offender, yes, but he was not the only one.

The rage began to come up in him again. He clamped down on it, tried to compress it, to turn it into something a little more useful - simple sternness would be enough, he thought. Then he walked between the camper and the station wagon parked next to it, his Gucci loafers whispering in the dry timothy grass, and into their midst.

There really were concentric circles: first the rough circle of vehicles, and inside that, a circle of men and women sitting around the fire, which burned in a dug hollow surrounded by a circle of stones. Nearby, a cut branch about six feet tall had been stuck into the earth. A yellow sheet of paper. - a campfire permit, Billy supposed - was impaled on its tip.

The younger men and women sat on the flattened grass or on air mattresses. Many of the older people were sitting on lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and woven plastic strips. Billy saw one old woman sitting propped up on pillows in a lounger, a blanket tucked around her. She was smoking a home-rolled cigarette and sticking S&H Green Stamps in a trading-stamp book.

Three dogs on the far side of the fire began to bark halfheartedly. One of the younger men looked up sharply and drew back one side of his vest, revealing a nickel-plated revolver in a shoulder holster.

'Enkelt!' one of the older men said sharply, putting his hand on the young man's hand.

'Bodde har?'

'Just det - han och Taduz!'

The young man looked toward Billy Halleck, who now stood in the midst of them, totally out of place in his baggy sport coat and city shoes. There was a look not of fear but momentary surprise and - Billy would have sworn it - compassion on his face. Then he was gone, pausing only long enough to administer a kick to one of the hounds and growl, 'Enkelt!' The hound yipped once and then they all shut up.

Gone to get the old man, Billy thought.

He looked around at them. All conversation had ceased. They regarded him with their dark Gypsy eyes and no one said a word. This is how it feels when your pants really do fall down in court, he thought, but that wasn't a bit true. Now that he was actually in front of them, the complexity of his emotions had disappeared. The fear was there, and the anger, but both idled quietly, somewhere deep inside.

And there's something else. They're not surprised to see you... and they're not surprised at how you look, either.

Then it was true; all true. No psychological anorexia; no exotic form of cancer. Billy thought that even Michael Houston would have been convinced by those dark eyes. They knew what had happened to him. They knew why it was happening. And they knew how it would end.

They stared at each other, the Gypsies and the thin man from Fairview, Connecticut. And suddenly, for no reason at all, Billy began to grin.

The old woman with the trading stamps moaned and forked the sign of the evil eye at him.

Approaching footsteps and a young woman's voice, speaking rapidly and angrily: 'Vad sa han! Och plotsligt brast han dybbuk, Papa! Alskling, grat inte! Snalla dybbuk! Ta mig Mamma!'

Taduz Lemke, dressed in a nightshirt which fell to his bony knees, stepped barefoot into the light of the campfire. Next to him, wearing a cotton nightgown that rounded sweetly against her hips as she walked, was Gina Lemke.

'Ta mig Mamma! Ta mig -' She caught sight of Billy standing in the center of the circle, his sport coat hanging, the seat of his pants bagging to almost below the coat's hem. She flung a hand up in his direction and then turned back to the old man as if to attack him. The others watched in silent impassivity. Another knot exploded in the fire. Sparks spiraled up in a tiny cyclone.

'Ta mig Mamma! Va dybbuk! Ta mig inte till mormor! Ordo! Vu'derlak!'

'Sa hon lagt, Gina,' the old man replied. His face and voice were both serene. One of his twisted hands stroked the smooth black flood of her hair, which fell to her waist. So far Taduz Lemke had not looked at Billy at all. 'Vi ska stanna.'

For a moment she sagged, and in spite of the lush curves she seemed very young to Billy. Then she wheeled toward him again, her face rekindling. It was as if someone had thrown a shot of gasoline onto a dying fire.

'You don't understand our lingo, mister?' she screamed at him. 'I say to my old-papa that you killed my old-mamma! I say you are a demon and we should kill you!'

The old man put a hand on her arm. She shook it free, and rushed at Billy, barely skirting the campfire on flying bare feet. Her hair streamed out behind her.

'Gina, verkligen glad!' someone cried, alarmed, but no one else spoke. The old man's serene expression did not change; he watched Gina approach Billy as an indulgent parent watches a wayward child.

She spat on him - an enormous amount of warm white spittle, as if her mouth had been full of it. Billy could taste some of it on his lips. It tasted like tears. She looked up at him with her enormous dark eyes, and in spite of all that had happened, in spite of how much he had lost of himself, he was aware that he still wanted her. And she knew it too, he realized - the darkness in her eyes was mostly contempt.

'If it would bring her back, you could spit on me until I drowned in it,' he said. His voice Was surprisingly clear and strong. 'But I'm not a dybbuk. Not a dybbuk, not a demon, not a monster. What you see...' He raised his arms and for a moment the firelight shone through his coat, making him look like a large but very malnourished white bat. He slowly lowered his hands to his sides again, 'is all that I am.'

For a moment she looked uncertain, almost fearful. Although her spittle was still trickling down his face, the contempt had left her eyes and Billy was wearily grateful for that.

'Gina!' It was Samuel Lemke, the juggler. He had appeared beside the old man and was still buckling his pants. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Bruce Springsteen on it. 'Enkelt men tillrackligt!'

'You are a murdering bastard,' she said to Billy, and walked back the way she had come. Her brother attempted to put an arm around her, but she shook him off and disappeared into the shadows. The old man turned to watch her go, and then at last he turned his gaze on Billy Halleck.

For a moment Billy stared at the festering hole in the middle of Lemke's face, and then his eyes were drawn to the man's eyes. The eyes of age, had he thought? They were something more than that ... and something less. It was emptiness he saw in them; it was emptiness which was their fundamental truth, not the surface awareness that gleamed on them like moonlight on dark water. Emptiness as deep and complete as the spaces which may lie between galaxies.

Lemke crooked a finger at Billy, and as if in a dream, Billy walked slowly around the campfire to where the old man stood in his dark gray nightshirt.

'Do you know Rom?' Lemke asked when Billy stood directly in front of him. His tone was almost intimate, but it carried clearly in the silent camp, where the only sound was the fire eating into dry wood.

Billy shook his head.

'In Rom we call you skummade igenom, which means "white man from town."'

He grinned, showing rotted tobacco-stained teeth. The dark hole where his nose had been stretched and writhed.

'But it also means how it sounds - ignorant scum.' Now his eyes finally let Billy's eyes go; Lemke seemed to lose all interest. 'Go on now, white man from town. You have no business with us, and we have no business with you. If we had business, it is done. Go back to your town.'

He began to turn away.

For a moment Billy only stood there with his mouth open, dimly realizing that the old man had hypnotized him - he had done it as easily as a farmer makes a chicken go to sleep by tucking its head under its wing.

That's IT? part of him suddenly screamed. All of the driving, all of the walking, all of the questions, all of the bad dreams, all of the days and nights, and that's IT? You're just going to stand here without saying a word? Just let him call you ignorant scum and then go back to bed?

'No, that is not it,' Billy said in a rough, loud voice.

Someone drew in a harsh, surprised breath. Samuel Lemke, who had been helping the old man toward the back of one of the campers, looked around, startled. After a moment Lemke himself turned around. His face was wearily amused, but Billy thought for just a moment, just as the firelight touched his face, he had seen surprise there as well.

Nearby, the young man who had first seen Billy reached under his vest again to where his revolver hung.

'She's very beautiful,' Billy said. 'Gina.'

'Shut up, white man from town,' Samuel Lemke said. 'I don't want to hear my sister's name come oud your mout.'

Billy ignored him. He looked at Lemke instead. 'Is she your granddaughter? Great-granddaughter?'

The old man studied him as if trying to decide whether or not something might be here after all - some sound other than the wind in a hollow ground. Then he began to turn away again.

'Perhaps you'd wait just a minute while I write down my own daughter's address,' Billy said, raising his voice. He did not raise it much; he did not need to in order to bring out its imperative edge, an edge he had honed in a good many courtrooms. 'She's not as lovely as your Gina, but we think she's very pretty. Perhaps they could correspond on the subject of injustice. What do you think, Lemke? Will they'be able to talk about that after I'm as dead as your daughter? Who is able to finally sort out where an injustice really lay? Children? Grandchildren? Just a minute, I'll write down the address. It'll only take a second; I'll put it on the back of a photograph I have of you. If they can't figure this mess out, maybe they can get together someday and shoot each other and then their kids can give it a try. What do you think, old man... does that make any more sense than this shit?'

Samuel put an arm on Lemke's shoulder. Lemke shook it off and walked slowly back to where Billy stood. Now Lemke's eyes were filled with tears of fury. His knotted hands slowly opened and closed. All the others watched, silent and frightened.

'You run my daught' over in the road, white man,' he said. 'You run my daught' over in the road and then you have... you are borjade rulla enough to come here and speak out of your mout to my ear. Hey, I known who done what. I taken care of it. Mostly we turn and we drive out of town. Mostly, yeah, we do dat. But sometimes we get our justice.' The old man raised his gnarled hand in front of Billy's eyes. Suddenly it snapped into a closed fist. A moment later blood began to drip from it. From the others came a mutter not of fear or surprise but approval. 'Rom justice, skummade igenom. The other two I take care of already. The judge, he jump out of a window two nights ago. He is -..'Taduz Lemke snapped his fingers and then blew on the ball of his thumb as if it were a seedling dandelion.

'Did that bring your daughter back, Mr Lemke Did she come back when Cary Rossington hit the ground out there in Minnesota?'

Lemke's lips twisted. 'I don't need her back. Justice ain't bringing the dead back, white man. Justice is justice. You want to get out of here before I fix you wit something else. I know what you and your woman were up to. You think I doan have the sight? I got the sight. You ask any of them. I got the sight a hundred years.'

There was an assenting murmur from those around the fire.

'I don't care how long you've had the sight,' Billy said. He reached out deliberately and grasped the old man's shoulders. From somewhere there was a growl of rage. Samuel Lemke started forward. Taduz Lemke turned his head and spat a single word in Romany. The younger man stopped, uncertain and confused. There were similar expressions on many of the faces around the campfire, but Billy did not see this; he saw only Lemke. He leaned toward him, closer and closer, until his nose almost touched the wrinkled, spongy mess that was all that remained of Lemke's nose.

'Fuck your justice,' he said. 'You know about as much about justice as I know about jet turbines. Take it off me.'

Lemke's eyes stared up into Billy's - that horrible emptiness just below the intelligence. 'Let go of me or I'll make it worse,' he said calmly. 'So much worse you think I blessed you the first time.'

The grin suddenly broke on Billy's face - the bony grin which looked like a crescent moon that had been pushed over on its back. 'Go ahead,' he said. 'Try. But you know, I don't think you can.'

The old man stared at him wordlessly.

'Because I helped do it to myself,' Billy said. 'They were right about that much, anyway - it's a partnership, isn't it? The cursed and the one who does the cursing. We were all in it with you together. Hopley, Rossington, and me. But I am opting out, old man. My wife was jerking me off in my big old expensive car, right, and your daughter came out between two parked cars in the middle of the block like any ordinary jaywalker, and that's right, too. If she had crossed at the corner she would be alive now. There was fault on both sides, but she's dead and I can never go back to what my life was before. It balances. Not the best balance in the history of the world, maybe, but it balances. They've got a way of saying it in Las Vegas - they call it a push. This is a push, old man. Let it end here.'

A strange and almost alien fear had arisen in Lemke's eyes when Billy began to smile, but now his anger, stony and obdurate, replaced it. 'I never take it off, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'I die widdit in my mout.'

Billy slowly brought his face down on Lemke's until their foreheads touched and he could smell the old man's odor - it was the smell of cobwebs and tobacco and dim urine. 'Then make it worse. Go ahead. Make it - how did you say? - like you blessed me the first time.'

Lemke looked at him for a moment longer, and now Billy sensed it was Lemke who was the one caught. Then suddenly Lemke turned his head to Samuel.

'Enkelt av lakan och kanske alskade! Just det!'

Samuel Lemke and the young man with the pistol under his vest tore Billy away from Taduz Lemke The old man's shallow chest rose and fell rapidly; his scant hair was disarrayed.

He's not used to being touched - not used to being spoken to in anger.

'It's a push,' Billy said as they pulled him away. 'Do you hear me?'

Lemke's face twisted. Suddenly, horribly, he was three hundred years old, a terrible living revenant.

'No poosh!' he cried at Billy, and shook his fist. 'No poosh, not never! You die thin, town man! You die like this!' He brought his fists together, and Billy felt a sharp stabbing pain in his sides, as if he had been between those fists. For a moment he could not get his breath and it felt as if all his guts were being squeezed together. 'You die thin!'

'It's a push,' Billy said again, struggling not to gasp.

'No poosh!' the old man screamed. In his fury at this continued contradiction, thin red color had crisscrossed his cheeks in netlike patterns. 'Get him out of here!'

They began to drag him back across the circle. Taduz Lemke stood watching, his hands on his hips and his face a stone mask.

'Before they take me away, old man, you ought to know my own curse will fall on your family,' Billy called, and in spite of the dull pain in his sides his voice was strong, calm, almost cheerful. 'The curse of white men from town.'

Lemke's eyes widened slightly, he thought. From the corner of his eye Billy saw the old woman with the trading stamps in her blanketed lap fork the sign of the evil eye at him again.

The two young men stopped pulling him for a moment; Samuel Lemke uttered a short, bewildered laugh, perhaps at the idea of a white upper-middle-class lawyer from Fairview, Connecticut, cursing a man who was probably the oldest Gypsy in America. Billy himself would have laughed two months ago.

Taduz Lemke, however, was not laughing.

'You think men like me don't have the power to curse?' Billy asked. He held his hands - his thin, wasted hands up on either side of his face and slowly splayed the fingers. He looked like a variety-show host asking an audience to end their applause. 'We have the power. We're good at cursing once we get started, old man. Don't make me start.'

There was movement behind the old man - a flash of white nightgown and black hair.

'Gina!' Samuel Lemke cried out.

Billy saw her step forward into the light. Saw her raise the slingshot, draw the cradle back, and release it all in the same smooth gesture - like an artist drawing a line on a blank pad. He thought he saw a liquid, streaky gleam in the air as the steel ball flew across the circle, but that was almost certainly just imagination.

There was a hot, glassy spear of pain in his left hand. It was gone almost as soon as it came. He heard the steel ball bearing she had fired thwang off the steel side of a van. At the same moment he realized he could see the girl's drawn, furious face, not framed in his spread fingers, but through his palm, where there was a neat round hole.

She slingshotted me, he thought. Holy Christ, she did! Blood, black as tar in the firelight, ran down the pad of his palm and soaked the sleeve of his sport coat.

'Enkelt!' she shrieked. 'Get out of here, eyelak! Get out of here, killing bastard!'

She threw the slingshot. It landed at the edge of the fire, a wishbone shape with a rubber cup the size of an eyepatch caught in its fork. Then she fled, shrieking.

No one moved. Those around the fire, the two young men, the old man, and Billy himself - all of them stood in tableau. There was the slam of a door, and the girl's shrieks were muffled. And still there was no pain.

Suddenly, not even knowing he meant to do it, Billy held his bleeding hand out toward Lemke. The old man flinched back and forked the sign of the evil eye at Billy. Billy closed his hand as Lemke had done; blood ran from his closed fist as it had run from Lemke's closed fist.

'The curse of the white man is on you, Mr Lemke - they don't write about that one in books, but I'm telling you it's true - and you believe that.'

The old man screamed a flood of Romany. Billy felt himself hauled backward so suddenly that his head snapped on his neck. His feet left the ground.

They're going to throw me in the fire. Christ, they're going to roast me in it...

Instead he was carried back the way he had come, through the circle (people fell out of their chairs scrambling away from him) and between two pickups with camper caps. From one of them Billy heard a TV crackling out something with a laugh track.

The man in the vest grunted, Billy was swung like a sack of grain (a very underweight sack of grain), and then for a moment he was flying. He landed in the timothy grass beyond the parked vehicles with a thud. This hurt a good deal more than the hole in his hand; there were no padded places on him anymore, and he felt his bones rattle inside his body like loose stakes in an old truck. He tried to get up and at first could not. White lights danced in front of his eyes. He groaned.

Samuel Lemke came toward him. The boy's handsome face was smooth and deadly and expressionless. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out something - Billy at first thought it was a stick and only recognised it for what it was when Lemke unfolded the blade.

He held his bleeding hand out, palm up, and Lemke hesitated. Now there was an expression on his face, one Billy recognized from his own bathroom mirror. It was fear.

His companion muttered something to him.

Lemke hesitated for a moment, looking down at Billy; then he refolded the blade into the knife's dark body. He spat in Billy's direction. A moment later the two of them were gone.

He lay there for a moment, trying to reconstruct everything, to make some sense of it ... but that was a lawyer's trick, and it would not serve him here in this dark place. His hand was starting to talk very loudly about what had happened to it now, and he thought that very soon it would hurt a lot more. Unless, of course, they changed their minds and came back here for him. Then they might end all hurting in very short order, and forever.

That got him moving. He rolled over, slid his knees up to what was left of his stomach, then paused there a moment with his left cheek pressed against the beaten timothy and his ass in the air while a wave of faintness and nausea rode through him like a breaking wave. When it passed he was able to get to his feet and start up the hill to where his car was parked. He fell down twice on the way. The second time he believed it was going to be impossible to get to his feet again. Somehow -mostly by thinking about Linda, sleeping quietly and blamelessly in her bed - he was able to do it. Now his hand felt as if a dark red infection was pulsing in it and working its way up his forearm toward his elbow.

An endless time later he reached the rental Ford and scrabbled for the keys. He had put them in his left pocket, and so had to reach across his crotch with his right hand to get at them.

He started the car and paused for a moment, his screaming hand lying palm-up on his left thigh like a bird that has been shot. He looked down at the circle of vans and campers and the twinkle of the fire. A ghost of some old song came to him: She danced around the fire to a Gypsy melody/Sweet young woman in motion, how she enchanted me...

He lifted his left hand slowly in front of his face. Ghostly green light from the car's instrument panel spilled through the round dark hole in his palm.

She enchanted me, all right, Billy thought, and dropped the car in Drive. He wondered with almost clinical detachment if he would be able to make it back to the Frenchman's Bay Motel.

Somehow, he did.

Chapter Twenty

'William? What's wrong?'

Ginelli's voice, which had been deeply blurred with sleep and ready to be angry, was now sharp with concern. Billy had found Ginelli's home number in his address book below the one for Three Brothers. He had dialed it without much hope at all, sure it would have been changed at some point during the intervening years.

His left hand, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay in his lap. It had turned into something like a radio station and was now broadcasting approximately fifty thousand watts of pain - the slightest movement sent it raving up his arm. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Images of crucifixion kept occurring to him.

'I'm sorry to call you at home, Richard,' he said, 'and so late.'

'Fuck that, what's wrong?'

'Well, the immediate problem is that I've been shot through the hand with a...'He shifted slightly, his hand flared, and his lips peeled back over his teeth. 'with a ball bearing.'

Silence at the other end.

'I know how it sounds, but it's true. The woman used a slingshot.'

'Jesus! What -' A woman's voice in the background. Ginelli spoke briefly in Italian to her and then came back on the line. 'This is no joke, William? Some whore put a ball bearing through your hand with a slingshot?'

'I don't call people at...' He looked at his watch and another flare of pain raced up his arm. '... at three o'clock in the morning and tell jokes. I've been sitting here for the last three hours trying to wait until a more civilized hour. But the pain...' He laughed a little, a hurt, helpless, bewildered sound. 'The pain is very bad.'

'Does this have to do with what you called me about before?'

'Yes.'

'It was Gypsies?'

'Yes. Richard...'

'Yeah? Well, I promise you one thing. They don't fuck with you anymore after this.'

'Richard, I can't go to a doctor with this and I'm in... I really am in a lot of pain.' Billy Halleck, Grandmaster of Understatement, he thought. 'Can you send me something? Maybe by Federal Express? Some kind of painkiller?'

'Where are you?'

Billy hesitated for just a moment, then shook his head a little. Everyone he trusted had decided he was crazy; he thought it very likely that his wife and his boss had gone through or soon would be going through the motions necessary to effect an involuntary committal in the state of Connecticut. Now his choices were very simple, and marvelously ironic: either trust this dope-dealing hood he hadn't seen in nearly six years, or give up completely.

Closing his eyes, he said: 'I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Frenchman's Bay Motel. Unit thirty-seven.'

'Just a second.'

Ginelli's voice moved away from the telephone again. Billy heard him speaking in a dim platter of Italian. He didn't open his eyes. At last Ginelli came back on the line again.

'My wife is making a. couple of calls for me,' he said. 'You're wakin' up guys in Norwalk right now, paisan. I hope you're satisfied.'

'You're a gentleman, Richard,' Billy said. The words came out in a guttural slur and he had to clear his throat. He felt too cold. His lips were too dry and he tried to wet them, but his tongue was dry too.

'You be very still, my friend,' Ginelli said. The concern was back in his voice. 'You hear me? Very still. Wrap up in a blanket if you want, but that's all. You've been shot. You're in shock.'

'No shit,' Billy said, and laughed again. 'I've been in shock for about two months now.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Never mind.'

'All right. But we got to talk, William.'

'Yes.'

'I... Hold on a second.' Italian, soft and faint. Halleck closed his eyes again and listened to his hand broadcast pain. After a while Ginelli came back on the phone. 'A man is going to come by with some painkiller for you. He

'Oh, hey, Richard, that's not

'Don't tell me my business, William, just listen. His name is Fander. He's no doctor, this guy, at least not anymore, but he's going to look at you and decide if you ought to have some antibiotics as well as the dope. He'll be there before daylight.'

'Richard, I don't know how to thank you,' Billy said. Tears were running down his cheeks; he wiped at them absently with his right hand.

'I know you don't,' Ginelli said. 'You're not a wop. Remember, Richard: just sit still.'

Fander arrived shortly before six o'clock. He was a little man with prematurely white hair who carried a country doctor's bag. He gazed at Billy's scrawny, emaciated body for a long moment without speaking and then carefully unwound the handkerchief from Billy's left hand. Billy had to put his other hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

'Raise it, please,' Fander said, and Billy did. The hand was badly swollen, the skin pulled taut and shiny. For a moment he and Fander gazed at each other through the hole in Billy's palm, which was ringed with dark blood. Fander took an odoscope from his bag and shone it through the wound. Then he turned it off.

'Clean and neat,' he said. 'If it was a ball bearing there's much less chance of infection than there would have been with a lead slug.'

He paused, considering.

'Unless, of course, the girl put something on it before she fired it.'

'What a comforting idea,' Billy croaked.

'I'm not paid to comfort people,' Fander said coolly, especially when I'm routed out of bed at three-thirty and have to change from my pajamas into my clothes in a light plane that is bouncing around at eleven thousand feet. You say it was a steel bearing?'

'Yes.'

'Then you're probably all right. You can't very well soak a steel ball bearing in poison the way the Jivaro Indians soaked their wooden arrowheads in curare, and it doesn't seem likely the woman could have painted it with anything if it was all as spur-of-the-moment as you say. This should heal well, with no complications.' He took out disinfectant, gauze, an elastic bandage. 'I'm going to pack the wound and then bandage it. The packing is going to hurt like hell, but believe me when I tell you that it's going to hurt a lot more in the long run if I leave it open.'

He cast another measuring eye on Billy - not so much the compassionate eye of a doctor, Billy thought, as the cold, appraising glance of an abortionist. 'This hand is going to be the least of your problems if you don't start eating again.'

Billy said nothing.

Fander looked at him a moment longer, then began packing the wound. At that point talk would have been impossible for Billy anyway; the pain-broadcasting station in his hand jumped from fifty thousand to two-hundred fifty thousand watts in one quick leap. He closed his eyes, clamped his teeth together, and waited for it to be over.

At last it was over. He sat with his throbbing bandaged hand in his lap and watched Fander root in his bag once more.

'All other considerations aside, your radical emaciation makes for problems when it comes to dealing with your pain. You're going to feel quite a bit more discomfort than you'd feel if your weight was normal, I'm afraid. I can't give you Darvon or Darvocet because they might put you in a coma or cause you to go into cardiac arrhythmia. How much do you weigh, Mr Halleck? A hundred and twenty-five?'

'About that,' Billy muttered. There was a scale in the bathroom, and he had stepped on it before going out to the camp of the Gypsies - it was his own bizarre form of pep rally, he supposed. The needle had centered on 118. All the running around in the hot summer sun had helped to speed things up considerably.

Fander nodded with a little moue of distaste. 'I'm going to give you some fairly strong Empirin. You take one single tablet. If you're not dozing off in half an hour, and if your hand is still very, very painful, you can take another half. And you go on like that for the next three or four days.' He shook his head. 'I just flew six hundred miles to give a man a bottle of Empirin. I can't believe it. Life can be very perverse. But considering your weight, even Empirin's dangerous. It ought to be baby aspirin.'

Fander removed another small bottle from his bag, this one unmarked.

'Aureomycin,' he said. 'Take one by mouth every six hours. But - mark this well, Mr Halleck - if you start having diarrhea, stop the antibiotic at once. In your state, diarrhea is a lot more apt to kill you than an infection from this wound.'

He snapped the bag shut and stood up.

'One final piece of advice that has nothing to do with your adventures in the Maine countryside. Get some potassium tablets as soon as possible and begin taking two every day - one when you get up, one when you go to bed. You'll find them at the drugstore in the vitamin section.'

'Why?'

'If you continue to lose weight, you will very soon begin to experience instances of heart arrhythmia whether you take Darvon or any other drug. This sort of arrhythmia comes from radical potassium depletion in the body. It may have been what killed Karen Carpenter. Good day, Mr Halleck.'

Fander let himself out into the first mild light of dawn.

For a moment he only stood there looking toward the sound of the ocean, which was very clear in the stillness.

'You really ought to get off whatever hunger strike you are on, Mr Halleck,' he said without turning around. 'In many ways the world is nothing but a pile of shit. But it can also be very beautiful.'

He walked toward a blue Chevrolet that was idling at the side of the building and got into the backseat. The car moved off.

'I'm trying to get off it,' Billy said to the disappearing car. 'I'm really trying.'

He closed the door and walked slowly back to the small table beside his chair. He looked at the medicine bottles and wondered how he was going to open them one-handed.

Chapter Twenty-one

Ginelli

Billy ordered a large lunch sent in. He had never been less hungry in his life, but he ate all of it. When he was done he risked taking three of Fander's Empirin, reasoning that he was putting them on top of a turkey club sandwich, french fries, and a wedge of apple pie that had tasted quite a bit like stale asphalt.

The pills hit him hard. He was aware that the pain transmitter in his hand had suddenly been reduced to a mere five thousand watts, and then he was cavorting through a feverish series of dreams. Gina danced across one of them, naked except for gold hoop earrings. Then he was crawling through a long dark culvert toward a round circle of daylight that always, maddeningly, stayed the same distance away. Something was behind him. He had a terrible feeling it was a rat. A very large rat. Then he was out of the culvert. If he had believed that would mean escape, he had been wrong - he was back in that starving Fairview. Corpses lay heaped everywhere. Yard Stevens lay sprawled in the middle of the town common, his own barber's shears driven deep into what remained of his throat. Billy's daughter leaned against a lamppost, nothing but a bunch of jointed sticks in her purple-and-white cheerleader's outfit. It was impossible to tell if she were really dead like the others or only comatose. A vulture fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. Its talons flexed once and its head darted forward. It ripped out a great swatch of her hair with its rotting beak. Bloody strands of scalp still clung to the ends, as clumps of earth cling to the roots of a plant which has been roughly pulled out of the ground. And she was not dead; Billy heard her moan, saw her hands stir weakly in her lap. No! he shrieked in this dream. He found he had the girl's slingshot in his hand. The cradle was loaded not with a ball bearing but a glass paperweight that sat on a table in the hall of the Fairview house. There was something inside the paperweight - some flaw - that looked like a blue-black thunderhead. Linda had been fascinated with it as a child. Billy fired the paperweight at the bird. It missed, and suddenly the bird turned into Taduz Lemke. A heavy thudding sound started somewhere - Billy wondered if it was his heart going into a fatal spell of arrhythmia. I never take it off, white man from town, Lemke said, and suddenly Billy was somewhere else and the thudding sound was still going on.

He looked stupidly around the motel unit, at first thinking this was only another locale in his dreams.

'William!' someone called from the other side of the door. 'Are you in there? Open this up or I'm gonna break it in! William! William!'

Okay, he tried to say, and no sound came out of his mouth. His lips had dried and gummed shut. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was Ginelli.

'William? Will... Oh, fuck.' This last was in a lower I'm-talking-to-myself voice, and was followed by a thump as Ginelli threw his shoulder against the door.

Billy got to his feet and the whole world wavered in and out of focus for a moment. He got his mouth open at last, his lips parting with a soft rip that he felt rather than heard.

'That's okay,' he managed. 'That's okay, Richard. I'm here. I'm awake now.'

He went across the room and opened the door.

'Christ, William, I thought you were..

Ginelli broke off and stared at him, his brown eyes widening and widening until Billy thought: He's going to run. You can't look that way at anyone or anything and not take to your heels as soon as you get over the first shock of whatever it was.

Then Ginelli kissed his right thumb, crossed himself, and said, 'Are you gonna let me in, William?'

Ginelli had brought better medicine than Fander's Chivas. He took the bottle out of his calfskin briefcase and poured them each a stiff hooker. He touched the rim of his plastic motel tumbler to the rim of Billy's.

'Happier days than these,' he said. 'How's that?'

'That's just fine,' Billy said, and knocked the shot off in one big swallow. After the explosion of fire in his stomach had subsided to a glow, he excused himself and went into the bathroom. He didn't need to use the toilet, but he did not want Ginelli to see him cry.

'What did he do to you?' Ginelli asked. 'Did he poison your food?'

Billy began to laugh. It was the first good laugh in a long time. He sat down in his chair again and laughed until more tears rolled down his cheeks.

'I love you, Richard,' he said when the laughter had tapered off to chuckles and a few shrill giggles. 'Everyone else, including my wife, thinks I'm crazy. The last time you saw me I was forty pounds overweight and now I look like I'm trying out for the part of the scarecrow in the remake of The Wizard of Oz and the first thing out of your mouth is "Did he poison your food?"'

Ginelli waved away both Billy's half-hysterical laughter and the compliment with the same impatience. Billy thought, Ike and Mike, they think alike, Lemke and Ginelli, too. When it comes to vengeance and countervengeance, they have no sense of humor.

'Well? Did he?'

'I suppose that he did. In a way, he did.'

'How much weight have you lost?'

Billy's eyes strayed to the wall-sized mirror across the room. He remembered reading - in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought - that every modem motel room in America seems filled with mirrors, although most of those rooms are used by overweight businessmen who have no interest in looking at themselves in an undressed state. Its state wag very much the opposite of overweight, but he could understand the antimirror sentiment. He supposed it was his face - no, not just his face, his whole head which had thrown such a fright into Richard. The size of his skull had remained the same, and the result was that his head perched atop his disappearing body like the hideously oversize head of a giant sunflower.

I never take it off you, white man from town, he heard Lemke say.

'How much weight, William?' Ginelli repeated. His voice was calm, gentle even, but his eyes sparkled in an odd, clear way. Billy had never seen a man's eyes sparkle in quite that way, and it made him a little nervous.

'When this began - when I came out of the courthouse and the old man touched me - I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. This morning I weighed in at a hundred and sixteen just before lunch. That's what ... a hundred and thirty-four pounds?'

'Jesus and Mary and Joseph the carpenter from Brooklyn Heights,' Ginelli whispered, and crossed himself again. 'He touched you?'

This is where he walks out - this is where they all walk out, Billy thought, and for one wild second he thought of simply lying, of making up some mad story of systematic food poisoning. But if there had ever been a time for lying, it was gone now. And if Ginelli walked, Billy would walk with him, at least as far as Ginelli's car. He would open the door for him and thank him very much for coming. He would do it because Ginelli had listened when Billy called in the middle of the night, and sent his rather peculiar version of a doctor, and then come himself. But mostly he would perform those courtesies because Ginelli's eyes had widened like that when Billy opened the door, and he still hadn't run away.

So you tell him the truth. He says the only things he believes in are guns and money, and that's probably the truth, but you tell him the truth because that's the only way you can ever pay back a guy like him.

He touched you? Ginelli had asked, and although that was only a second ago it seemed much longer in Billy's scared, confused mind. Now he said what was the hardest thing for him to say. 'He didn't just touch me, Richard. He cursed me.'

He waited for that rather mad sparkle to die out of Ginelli's eyes. He waited for Ginelli to glance at his watch, hop to his feet, and grab his briefcase. Time sure has a way of flying, doesn't it? I'd love to stay and talk over this curse business with you, William, but I've got a hotplate of veal marsala waiting for me back at the Brothers, and...

The sparkle didn't die and Ginelli didn't get up. He crossed his legs, neatened the crease, brought out a package of Camel cigarettes, and lit one.

'Tell me everything,' he said.

Billy Halleck told Ginelli everything. When he was done, there were four Camel butts in the ashtray. Ginelli was looking fixedly at Billy, as if hypnotized. A long silence spun out. It was uncomfortable, and Billy wanted to break it, but he didn't know how. He seemed to have used up all of his words.

'He did this to you,' Ginelli said at last. 'This...' He waved a hand at Billy.

'Yes. I don't expect you to believe it, but yes, he did.'

I believe it,' Ginelli said almost absently.

'Yeah? What happened to the guy who only believed in guns and money?'

Ginelli smiled, then laughed. 'I told you that when you called that time, didn't I?'

'Yeah.'

The smile faded. 'Well, there's one more thing I believe in, William. I believe in what I see. That's why I'm a relatively rich man. That's also why I'm a living man. Most people, they don't believe what they see.'

'No?'

'No. Not unless it goes along with what they already believe. You know what I saw in this drugstore where I go? Just last week I saw this.'

What?'

They got a blood-pressure machine in there. I mean, they sometimes got them in shopping malls, too, but in the drugstore it's free. You put your arm through a loop and push a button. The loop closes. You sit there for a while and think serene thoughts and then it lets go. The reading flashes up in big red numbers. Then you look on the chart where it says "low," "normal," and "high" to figure out what the numbers mean. You get this picture?'

Billy nodded.

'Okay. So I am waiting for the guy to give me a bottle of this stomach medicine my mother has to take for her ulcers. And this fat guy comes waddling in. I mean, he goes a good two-fifty and his ass looks like two dogs fightin' under a blanket. There's a drinker's road map on his nose and cheeks and I can see a pack of Marlboros in his pocket. He picks up some of those Dr Scholl's corn pads and he's taking them to the cash register when the high-bloodpressure machine catches his eye. So he sits down and the machine does its thing. Up comes the reading. Two-twenty over one-thirty, it says. Now, I don't know a whole fuck of a lot about the wonderful world of medicine, William, but I know two-twenty over one-thirty is in the creepy category. I mean, you might as well be walking around with the barrel of a loaded pistol stuck in your ear, am I right?'

'Yes.'

'So what does this dummocks do? He looks at me and says, "All this digital shit is fucked up." Then he pays for his corn pads and walks out. You know what the moral of that story is, William? Some guys - a lot of guys - don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat or drink or think or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if I saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying, "Jesus, that was a great special effect." The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. And you can quote me.'

Billy looked at him consideringly for a moment, and then burst out laughing. After a moment, Ginelli joined him.

'Well,' he said, 'you still sound like the old William when you laugh, anyway. The question is, William, what are we going to do about this geezer?'

I don't know.' Billy laughed again, a shorter sound. 'But I guess I have to do something. After all, I cursed

'So you told me. The curse of the white dude from town. Considering what all the white dudes from all the towns have done in the last couple hundred years, that could be a pretty heavy one.' Ginelli paused to light another cigarette and then said matter-of-factly through the smoke: 'I can hit him, you know.'

'No, that won't w -' Billy began, and then his mouth snapped closed. He'd had an image of Ginelli walking up to Lemke and punching him in the eye. Then suddenly he had realized that Ginelli was speaking of something much more final. 'No, you can't do that,' he finished.

Ginelli either didn't understand or affected not to. 'Sure I can. And I can't get anyone else to, that's for sure. At least, not anyone trustworthy. But I am as capable of doing it now as I was at twenty. It ain't business, but believe me, it would be a pleasure.'

'No, I don't want you to kill him or anyone else,' Billy said. 'That's what I meant.'

'Why not?' Ginelli asked, still reasonable - but his eyes, Billy saw, continued to whirl and twirl in that mad way. 'You worried about being an accessory to murder? It wouldn't be murder, it'd be self-defense. Because he is killing you, Billy. Another week of this and people will be able to read the signs you're standing in front of without asking you to move. Another two and you won't dare to go out in a high wind for fear of blowing away.'

'Your medical associate suggested that I might die of cardiac arrhythmia before it went that far. Presumably my heart is losing weight right along with the rest of me.' He swallowed. 'You know, I never had that particular thought until just now. I sort of wish I hadn't had it at all.'

'See? He's killing you... but never mind. You don't: want me to hit him, I won't hit him. Probably not a good idea anyway. It might not end it.'

Billy nodded. This had occurred to him, as well. Take it off me, he had told Lemke - apparently even white men from town understood that was something that had to be done. If Lemke was dead, the curse might simply have to run itself out.

'The trouble is,' Ginelli said reflectively, 'you can't take back a hit.'

'No.'

He rubbed out his cigarette and stood up. 'I gotta think about this, William. It's a lot to think about. And I got to get my mind in a serene state, you know? You can't get ideas about complicated shit like this when you're upset, and every time I look at you, paisan, I want to pull out this guy's pecker and stuff it in the hole where his nose used to be.'

Billy got up and almost fell. Ginelli grabbed him and Billy hugged him clumsily with his good arm. He didn't think he'd ever hugged a grown man in his life before this.

'Thank you for coming,' Billy said. 'And for believing me.'

'You're a good fellow,' Ginelli said, releasing him. 'You're in a bad mess, but maybe we can get you out of it. Either way, we're gonna put some stone blocks to this old dude. I'm gonna go out and walk around for a couple of hours, Billy. Get my mind serene. Think up some ideas. Also, I want to make some phone calls back to the city.'

'About what?'

'I'll tell you later. First I want to do some thinking. You be okay?'

'Yes.'

'Lie down. You have no color in your face at all.'

'All right.' He did feel sleepy again, sleepy and totally worn out.

'The girl who shot you,' Ginelli said. 'Pretty?'

'Very pretty.'

'Yeah?' That crazy light was back in Ginelli's eyes, brighter than ever. It troubled Billy.

'Yeah.'

'Lay down, Billy. Catch some Z's. Check you later.

Okay to take your key?'

'Sure.'

Ginelli left. Billy lay down on the bed and put his bandaged hand carefully down beside him, knowing perfetly well that if he fell asleep he would probably just roll over on it and wake himself up again.

Probably just humoring me, Billy thought. Probably on the phone to Heidi right now. And when I wake up, the men with the butterfly nets will be sitting on the foot of the bed. They...

But there was no more. He drifted off and somehow managed to avoid rolling on his bad hand.

And this time there were no bad dreams.

There were no men with butterfly nets in the room when he woke up, either. Only Ginelli, sitting in the chair across the room. He was reading a book called This Savage Rapture and drinking a can of beer. It was dark outside.

There were four cans of a six-pack sitting on top of an ice bucket on the TV, and Billy licked his lips. 'Can I have one of those?' he croaked.

Ginelli looked up. 'It's Rip Van Winkle, back from the dead! Sure you can. Here, let me open you one.'

He brought it to Billy, and Billy drank half of it without stopping. The beer was fine and cold. He had heaped the contents of the Empirin bottle in one of the room's ashtrays (motel rooms did not have as many ashtrays as mirrors, he thought, but almost). Now he fished one out and washed it down with another swallow.

'How's the hand?' Ginelli asked.

'Better.' In a way that was a lie, because his hand hurt very badly indeed. But in a way it was the truth, too. Because Ginelli was here, and that did more to make the pain less than the Empirin or even the shot of Chivas. Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all. This caused him to think of Heidi, because she was the one who should have been with him, not this hood, and she wasn't. Heidi was back in Fairview, stubbornly ignoring all this, because to give it any mental house-room would mean she might have to explore the boundaries of her own culpability, and Heidi did not want to do that. Billy felt a dull, throbbing resentment. What had Ginelli said? The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing. He tried to push the resentment away - she was, after-all, his wife. And she was doing what she believed was right and best for him... wasn't she? The resentment went, but not very far.

'What's in the shopping bag?' Billy asked. The bag was sitting on the floor.

'Goodies,' Ginelli said. He looked at the book he was reading, then tossed it into the wastebasket. 'That sucks like an Electrolux. I couldn't find a Louis Lamour.'

'What kind of goodies?'

'For later. When I go out and visit your Gypsy friends.'

'Don't be foolish,' Billy said sharply. 'You want to end up looking like me? Or maybe like a human umbrella stand?'

'Easy, easy,' Ginelli said. His voice was amused and soothing, but that light in his eyes whirled and twirled. Billy realized suddenly that it hadn't all been spur-of-the-moment bullshit; he really had cursed Taduz Lemke. The thing he had cursed him with was sitting across from him in a cheap leatherette motel chair and drinking a Miller Lite. And with equal parts amusement and horror, he realized something else as well: perhaps Lemke knew how to lift his curse, but Billy hadn't the slightest idea of how to lift the curse of the white man from town. Ginelli was having a good time. More fun, maybe, than he'd had in years. He was like a pro bowler coming eagerly out of retirement to take part in a charity event. They would talk, but their talk would change nothing. Ginelli was his friend. Ginelli was a courtly if not exactly grammatical man who called him William instead of Bill or Billy. He was also a very large, very proficient hunting dog which had just slipped its chain.

'Don't tell me to take it easy,' he said, 'just tell me what you plan to do.'

'No one gets hurt,' Ginelli said. 'Just hold that thought, William. I know that's important to you. I think you're holding on to some, you know, principles you can't exactly afford anymore, but I got to go along because that's what you want and you are the offended party. No one gets hurt in this at all. Okay?'

'Okay,' Billy said. He was a little relieved... but not much.

'At least, not unless you change your mind,' Ginelli said.

'I won't.'

'You might.'

'What's in the bag?'

'Steaks,' Ginelli said, and took one out. It was a porterhouse wrapped in clear plastic and marked with a Sampson's label. 'Looks good, huh, I got four of 'em.'

'What are they for?'

'Let's keep things in order,' Ginelli said. 'I left here, I walked downtown. What a fucking horror show! You can't even walk on the sidewalk. Everyone's wearing Ferrari sunglasses and shirts with alligators on their tits. It looks like everyone in this town has had their teeth capped and most of 'em have had nose-jobs too.'

'I know.'

'Listen to this, William. I see this girl and guy walking along, right? And the guy has got his hand in the back pocket of her shorts. I mean, they are right out in public and he's got his hand in her back pocket, feeling her ass. Man, if that was my daughter she wouldn't sit down on what her boyfriend was feeling for about a week and a half.

'So I know I can't get my mind in a serene state there, and I gave it up. I found a telephone booth, made a few calls. Oh, I almost forgot. The phone was in front of a drugstore, so I went in and got you these.' He took a bottle of pills from his pocket and tossed it to Billy, who caught it with his good hand. They were potassium capsules.

'Thank you, Richard,' he said, his voice a little uneven.

'Don't mention it, just take one. You don't need a fucking heart attack on top of everything else.'

Billy took one with a swallow of beer. His head was starting to buzz gently now.

'So I got some people sniffing around after a couple of things and then I went down by the harbor,' Ginelli resumed. 'I looked at. the boats for a while. William, there must be twenty... thirty... maybe forty million dollars' worth of boats down there! Sloops, yawls, fucking frigates, for all I could tell. I don't know diddlyfuck about boats, but I love to look at them. They...'

He broke off and looked thoughtfully at Billy.

'You think some of those guys in the alligator shirts and the Ferrari sunglasses are running dope in those pussywagons?'

'Well, I read in the Times last winter that a lobsterman on one of the islands around here found about twenty bales of stuff floating around under the town dock, and it turned out to be some pretty good marijuana.'

'Yeah. Yeah, that's about what I thought. This whole place has that smell to it. Fucking amateurs. They ought to just sail their pretty boats and leave the work to people who understand it, you know? I mean, sometimes they get in the way and then measures have to be taken and some guy finds a few bodies floating around under a dock instead of a few bales of weed. It's too bad.'

Billy took another large swallow of beer and coughed on it.

'But that is neither here nor there. I took a walk, looked at all those boats, and got my mind serene. And then I figured out what to do... or at least, the start of it and the shape of how it should go afterward. I don't have all the details worked out yet, but that'll come.

'I walked back to the main drag and made a few more calls - follow-up calls. There is no warrant out for your arrest, William, but your wife and this nose-jockey doctor of yours sure did sign some papers on you. I wrote it down.' He took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. "'Committal in absentia." That sound right?'

Billy Halleck's mouth dropped open and a wounded sound fell out of it. For a moment he was utterly stunned and then the fury which had become his intermittent companion swept through him again. He had thought it might happen, yes, had thought Houston would suggest it, and even thought Heidi might agree to it. But thinking about something and hearing it had actually happened - that your own wife had gone before a judge, had testified that you had gone loony, and had been granted a res gestae order of committal which she had then signed - that was very different.

'That cowardly bitch,' he muttered thickly, and then the world was blotted out by red agony. He had closed his hands into fists without thinking. He groaned and looked down at the bandage on his left hand. Flowers of red were blooming there.

I can't believe you just thought that about Heidi, a voice in his mind spoke up.

It's just because my mind is not serene, he answered the voice, and then the world grayed out for a while.

It wasn't quite a faint, and he came out of it quickly. Ginelli changed the bandage on his hand and repacked the wound, doing a job that was clumsy but fairly adequate. While he did it, he talked.

'My man says it don't mean a thing unless you go back to Connecticut, William.'

'No, that's true. But don't you see? My own wife.'

'Never mind that, William. It doesn't matter. If we can fix things up with this old Gypsy, you'll start to gain weight again and their case is out of the window. If that happens, you'll have plenty of time to decide what you want to do about your wife. Maybe she needs a slapping to sharpen her up a little, you know? Or maybe you just got to walk. You can decide that shit for yourself if we can fix things up with the Gyp - or you can write Dear Fucking Abby, if you want. And if we can't fix things up, you're gonna die. Either way, this thing is gonna get taken care of. So what's the big deal about them getting a paper on your head?'

Billy managed a white-lipped smile. 'You would have made a great lawyer, Richard. You have this unique way of putting things in perspective.'

'Yeah? You think so?'

'I do.'

'Well, thanks. Next I called Kirk Penschley.'

'You talked with Kirk Penschley?'

'Yes.'

'Jesus, Richard!'

'What, you think he wouldn't take a call from a cheap hood like me?' Ginelli managed to sound both wounded, and amused at the same time. 'He took it, believe me. Of course, I called on my credit card - he wouldn't want my name on his phone bill, that much is true. But I've done a lot of business with your firm over the years, William.'

'That's news to me,' Billy said. 'I thought it was just that one time.'

'That time everything could be out in the open, and you were just right for it,' Ginelli said. 'Penschley and his big stud-lawyer partners would never have stuck you into something crooked. William - you were a comer. On the other hand, I suppose they knew you'd be meeting me sooner or later, if you hung around long enough in the firm, and that first piece of work would be a good introduction. Which it was - for me as well as for you, believe me. And if something went wrong - if our business that time had happened to turn the wrong corner or something - you could have been sacrificed. They wouldn't have liked to do it, but their view is better to sacrifice a comer than a genuine bull stud-lawyer. These guys all see the same they are very predictable.'

'What other kind of business have you done with my firm?' Billy asked, frankly fascinated - this was a little like finding out your wife had been cheating on you long after you had divorced her for other reasons.

'Well, all kinds - and not exactly with your firm. Let's say they have brokered legal business for me and a number of my friends and leave it at that. Anyway, I know Kirk well enough to call him and ask for a favor. Which he granted.'

'What favor?'

'I asked him to call this Barton bunch and tell them to lay off for a week. Lay off you, and lay off the Gypsies. I'm actually more concerned about the Gypsies, you want to know the truth. We can do this, William, but it'll be easier if we don't have to chase them from hoot to holler and then back to fucking hoot again.'

'You called Kirk Penschley and told him to lay off,' Billy said, bemused.

'No, I called Kirk Penschley and told him to tell the Barton agency to lay off,' Ginelli corrected. 'And not exactly in those words, either. I can' be a little bit political when I have to be, William. Give me some credit.'

'Man, I give you a lot of credit. More every minute.'

'Well, thank you. Thank you, William. I appreciate that.' He lit a cigarette. 'Anyway, your wife and her doctor friend will continue to get reports, but they'll be a little bit off. I mean, they'll be like the National Enquirer and Reader's Digest version of the truth - do you dig what I am saying.

Billy laughed. 'Yeah, I see.'

'So, we got a week. And a week should be enough.'

'What are you going to do?'

'All you'll let me do, I guess. I am going to scare them, William. I'm going to scare him. I'm going to scare him so bad he's gonna need to put a fucking Delco tractor battery in his pacemaker. And I'm going to keep raising the level of the scares until one of two things happens. Either he is gonna cry uncle and take off what he put on you, or we decide he don't scare, that old man. If that happens, I come back to you and ask if you have changed your mind about hurting people. But maybe it won't go that far.'

'How are you going to scare him?'

Ginelli touched the shopping bag with the toe of one Bally boot and told him how he meant to start. Billy was appalled. Billy argued with Ginelli, as he had foreseen; then he talked with Ginelli, as he had also foreseen; and although Ginelli never raised his voice, his eyes continued to whirl and twirl with that mad light and Billy knew he might as well have been talking to the man in the moon.

And as the fresh pain in his hand slowly subsided to the former throbbing ache, he began to feel sleepy again.

'When are you going?' he asked, giving up.

Ginelli glanced at his watch. 'Ten past ten now. I'll give them another four or five hours. They been doing a good little business out there, from what I heard downtown. Telling a lot of fortunes. And the dogs - those pit-bulls. Christ Almighty. The dogs you saw weren't pit-bulls, were they?'

'I never saw a pit-bull,' Billy said sleepily. 'The ones I saw all looked like hounds.'

'Pit-bulls look like a cross between terriers and bulldogs. They cost a lot of dough. If you want to see pit-bulls fight, you got to agree to pay for one dead dog before the wagers even get put down. It's one nasty business.

'They're into all the classy stuff in this town, ain't they, William - Ferrari sunglasses, dope boats, dogfights. Oh, sorry -and tarot and the I Ching.'

'Be careful,' Billy said.

'I'll be careful,' Ginelli said, 'don't worry.'

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26